Blog House: For McCain, a cross to bear?

At the Aug. 16 Saddleback Forum, when asked by the Rev. Rick Warren what being a Christian means to him, Sen. John McCain related a story of a Christmas spent as a POW in Vietnam:

"I was standing outside, for my few minutes outside at my cell. [A Vietnamese guard] came walking up. He stood there for a minute, and with his sandal on the dirt in the courtyard, he drew a cross and he stood there. And a minute later, he rubbed it out, and walked away. For a minute there, there was just two Christians worshipping together. I'll never forget that moment."

The congregation was moved by the power of the tale. But to rickrocket, a Daily Kos (1) diarist, the story seemed a tad too perfect.

It just sounded so fake and so contrived, so I did a little research about it. ... I searched around a little bit more and here is what I found. A story about Alexander Solzhenitsyn from his times in the Soviet Gulags.

You be the judge. In 1997, the Rev. Luke Veronis recounted a story the Russian author told him:

"As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work. As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible."

The story really got legs in the blogosphere when Andrew Sullivan (2) picked it up.

McCain has used what appears to be an intensely personal moment in a prison camp as a reason to vote for him in a campaign ad. As he tells it today, it was the pivotal moment in his struggle to survive in the Hanoi Hilton. And yet, in his first thorough account of his time in captivity, in 1973, the story is absent. ... I have one simple question: when was the first time that McCain told this story?

Sullivan did some investigating and discovered that the story remained untold until 1999, coinciding with McCain's decision to make his first bid for the White House.

Dean Bartlett at the Weekly Standard (3) said that Democrats push this at their own peril.

By all means, let's focus more attention on McCain's stint at the Hanoi Hilton. Maybe the Obama campaign will offer up as a counterpoint Obama's supremely courageous opposition to the Iraq War while on the front lines of the Illinois state legislature. And by all means, let's have the left continue its campaign to minimize McCain's service in Vietnam. That should work wonders for Obama!

But there's just one problem with Bartlett's advice. While rickrocket raised the questions this week, it was Free Republic (4) bloggers who first took notice of McCain's story in 2005 and expressed skepticism.

Perhaps McCain is making obvious Christian statements to gain support for 2008. ... Do I sense a run for president coming up? Sorry if I'm too cynical. ... Could be wrong, but everything I know about John McCain makes me disinclined to believe this is anything but an attempt to mimic G.W.B.'s moment in the primaries when that bond was cemented.

No More Mr. Nice Blog (5) provided the evidence.

It's been noted that McCain made no mention of this incident in a detailed account of his POW years that U.S. News published in 1973, and no one, so far, has found evidence of McCain telling the story before 1999 -- when his most formidable opponent for the GOP presidential nomination was a man who was making a concerted effort to court religious voters. I just want to point out that there's a chapter specifically devoted to three Christmases of McCain's captivity in The Nightingale's Song, Robert Timberg's critically acclaimed 1995 book, which helped put McCain on the map as a political celebrity -- and the cross story does not appear. ... isn't it odd that the cross in the dirt -- which McCain has since described as a life-altering incident -- never came up?

There are a thousand possible innocent explanations for the evolution of the story, but there is also one that is sinister: that McCain created or appropriated a story of a very personal moment to sway evangelical voters. Steven Waldman of BeliefNet (6) hopes it isn't the case.

It makes me very uncomfortable questioning someone's POW camp memories. It's possible this did happen but that McCain originally viewed the moment has being largely about the goodness of the guard, rather than his own faith. That would be a campaign misdemeanor, not a felony. But if this turns out to be substantially altered or made up, it will be absolutely devastating to McCain.

In 2004, instead of honoring the military service of John Kerry, the Republicans made a huge issue out of his "Christmas in Cambodia." If it turns out that McCain's Christmas at the Hanoi Hilton comes back to haunt him, the party can only blame itself.

tobrien@startribune.com

SEE FOR YOURSELF WHERE TO FIND THE BLOGS

1 Daily Kos • dailykos.com

2 Andrew Sullivan • andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

3 Weekly Standard • weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/

4 Free Republic • freerepublic.com

5 No More Mr. Nice Blog • nomoremister.blogspot.com/

6 BeliefNet • blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman

7 Ezra Klein • prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein

Editor's note: Blog excerpts are not edited for style or spelling.